ARCHIVE FOR The Writing Life

In this post, GrubStreet instructor Ben Berman considers the tension between the pleasures of writing and the pressures of being a writer.

The other day we were at some friends’ house when I found myself in a conversation with their six-year-old son.

My dad told me that you’re a writer, he said.

I had the distinct honor of introducing my dear friend Debbie Plummer at the Harvard Book Store last week as she launched her new book, Some of My Best Friends Are... The Daunting Challenges and Untapped Potential of Cross-Racial Friendships.   Below is a truncated version of my remarks. 

When writing the fiction of violence, Katrin Schumann finds that there are no easy answers about how to get it right. This article first appeared in CrimeReads.

Years ago in a writing workshop in San Francisco, a lanky middle-aged student sitting next to me held his pages in trembling fingers. He began to read aloud a story about a body found in the trunk of a car. As he read, we all listened attentively, drawn in at first by the obvious questions: who was this woman and what had happened to her? We were trying to learn to become better writers

Building a supportive network takes time and courage. Novelist Katrin Schumann argues that it’s worth starting to cultivate community early on, even if your instinct or your preference is to work alone. This post first appeared on JaneFriedman.com.

I’ve always found people who make movies to be awe-inspiring—in order to evoke a world and a story on screen, they need to work together with dozens of other professionals, from front-end people like actors and directors, to back-end people like sound editors

In this post GrubStreet Instructor, Ben Berman, uses his daughters’ relationship with the moon to discuss the ideals of Romanticism and Modernism.

My older daughter has always been transfixed by the moon.

When she was a baby we would sit on the back porch and watch it rise over our neighbor’s house. She would clap her hands wildly and rub her chest please, begging me to climb into the night sky and retrieve it for her.